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James Bridle & Charles Leadbeater kick-start openness in Guimarães

The Open City programme launched this week with two commissions focusing on openness as it relates to governance, design, technology and culture in contemporary cities. Internationally recognised thought leader on openness, cities and the new internet culture, Charles Leadbeater has authored a piece on city development and regeneration called ‘The Hospitable City’, which is also available in Portuguese.People are invited to comment with the website acting as a platform for open dialogue about the various topics within open city thinking.

Mark and I were in Guimarães a couple of days ago to launch the first in a series of two open mapping workshops, ran by artist, writer and publisher James Bridle .The mapping workshops ‘Guimarães created by everybody’ invite participants to explore how technology understands and represents our world. In the first workshop ‘Walking the Streets’ used a technique called walking papers, to create instant alterations to a city’s maps on Open Street Map.

As James noted: “Guimarães has some representation on OSM, but it doesn’t come close to an actual map of the city – and neither do many of the competitors. As such, it’s a brilliant opportunity for learning about and contributing to a truly citizen-owned map of the city.”

All of us went out into the glorious sunshine armed with paper map templates and mapped parts of the city previously invisible to visitors. The Guimarães 2012 programme includes many activities in interesting and peculiar buildings and tucked away streets, none of which could be found on any maps. An example of this was the Mercado Municipal (the market hall) where, apart from the weekly market, the Pop Up programme hosts artistic events such as the guerilla gardens. You will be able to find where that is now on Open Street Map.

The workshop took place in CAAA, which is an old factory, now transformed into a thriving art gallery, exhibition space, studios and also home to a digital lab called LCD who kindly hosted us. The workshop was completely booked out and we loved the fact that the participants had such varied backgrounds, ranging from a field biologist to a programmer to a visual artist.

James’s presentation and a full write up of the workshop, including instructions on how to carry on mapping can be found on his blog.

The workshop was concluded with the famous local Vinho Verde (green wine) and a presentation about James’ other interests.

We are really looking forward to the second workshop in July ‘Walking the Sky’, where participants are going to be walking around Guimarães sporting a bundle of massive balloons with cameras attached to it. This will then generate the imagery for the aerial maps. It is going to be fun and sure to attract attention from passers by. For more information about this particular workshop keep an eye on: http://watershed.co.uk/opencity/commissions/james-bridle/ and the Facebook page for Open City.

We had a brilliant time and met up with some really interesting projects and people. Over the course of the next couple of weeks we will be in a position to announce the majority of the rest of our programme and we will go out there again in July